Ok, I tried the automated installer, then did it all again manually (so much nicer doing it manually), and I got the following problem on both occasions:

The system is installed fine, my problem is the bootloader will not boot!

Grub gives the following:

Quote:

GRUB loading stage1.5.
GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 5

Error 5 means a partition problem. I have checked & double checked my grub.conf file, but to no avail. So I thought I would try lilo. Lilo gets further, it actually starts to boot the kernel. The kernel then panics and gives the following:

My computer is strange. I have IDE raid, meaning I have 3CD/DVD drives (hda,hdb,hdc) on the normal IDE channels. Then on the IDE raid I have three discs, hde, hdf, hdg. My RAID setup allows me to choose which device my BIOS chooses to boot from. Previously hdg contained the MBR (for Windows) and still does. I changed the RAID to look for the MBR on hdf, which it now does. hdf is the drive with gentoo installed on. hde is full of files. It is a mess I know!

my /boot/grub/device.map file contains the following (generated from grub-install)

Code:

(hd0) /dev/hde
(hd1) /dev/hdf
(hd2) /dev/hdg

I have also tried running the grub command and setting grub up myself.

If you need any other information please just let me know. I'm willing to try everything since I want to use gentoo, not XP (any more) or another linux distro!

It looks like the kernel is missing the driver for your root filesystem.

scwcouk wrote:

My computer is strange. I have IDE raid, meaning I have 3CD/DVD drives (hda,hdb,hdc) on the normal IDE channels. Then on the IDE raid I have three discs, hde, hdf, hdg. My RAID setup allows me to choose which device my BIOS chooses to boot from.

Setting up GRUB (or any other bootloader) on a computer with multiple harddrives can be a bit tricky. The bootloader only finds out how the drives are ordered at boot time. The bootloader has to guess how the drives are ordered at installation time.

scwcouk wrote:

my /boot/grub/device.map file contains the following (generated from grub-install)

Code:

(hd0) /dev/hde
(hd1) /dev/hdf
(hd2) /dev/hdg

I have also tried running the grub command and setting grub up myself.

If you are booting from /dev/hdf , then this is an example of GRUB guessing the boot order incorrectly.
At boot time, the device.map is not consulted, and whatever harddrive you boot from becomes (hd0)